PUSS the adventurous tomcat, who its owner belives unwittingly hitched a ride in a van, finally staggered home in the early hours of this morning – exactly a week after mysteriously disappearing from a smallholding.

Jane Worrall had launched an appeal on discovering her pet had gone missing after sub-contractors working for Openreach carried out work outside her property last week.

Jane was convinced Puss had ‘stowed away’ inside one of their vehicles and possibly leapt out when the men stopped at their next job in Talsarn.

And her suspicions were seemingly confirmed today when a very hungry and footsore cat appeared through the cat flap at around 12.30am.

“He’s very thin with sore paws,” a delighted Jane told the Cambrian News. “Diagnosis - he hopped out of a van in Talsarn, not somewhere in south Wales as we feared.

“Our initial emotion was one of a sheer relief and then pure happiness at having him home. Puss is clearly very happy too – he’s lost quite a bit of weight and is eating double his usual amount of food.

“We’ll never know for sure just where he hopped out of that van, but his paws are pretty sore so he must have walked a long way.”

Jane’s increasingly desperate search for Puss had taken her to Cardiff and Merthyr in a bid to track down the sub-contractors employed by Kelly Communications who inadvertently ‘kidnapped’ her two-year-old pet.

She had previously expressed frustration at the difficulties in establishing the identity of the workmen.

“Surely on very basic security grounds that information should be available to the householder who has a right to know or at least be able to contact such teams?” she said last week.

Speaking this morning she said: “I have written to BT/Openreach/Kelly Communications suggesting that Openreach and their sub-contractors adopt the same policy as BT, who emailed me prior to their engineer’s arrival yesterday with his name and mobile number. 

“BT have also said they will be looking at their communication systems with Openreach. So maybe some good will come of it in the long run if these changes are implemented.

“The other positive is that so many kind and concerned people all over Ceredigion and south Wales have been sharing Puss’s details on Facebook, and contacting me with suggestions - quite heartwarming!

“I would like to thank everyone in Talsarn who had been keeping an eye out for him.”